CloudVelocity Seeks To Champion Enterprise Hybrid Cloud

Startup maps out applications, creates clones and moves them to cloud data center.

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CloudVelocity has launched the beta version of its system that discovers an application, creates a "blueprint" of it from which a duplicate can be created, and then sends the clone to another location to run in a similar manner.

To do so, the CloudVelocity system must be able to identify the application's dependencies, such as networks, storage and database systems used, then generate equivalents from the blueprint at the new location.

One of the most likely places a clone is to be run, conceded CEO Rajeev Chawla, is Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud. Thus, CloudVelocity is looking to become the agent that enables hybrid cloud computing. Run your system in the enterprise, and have a clone standing by -- ready to be fired up when traffic demands it -- in the cloud. CloudVelocity will handle some of the details of the migration under the covers.

For example, many enterprise applications are now running in a virtual machine under VMware's ESX Server. ESX Server uses a different file format than the Amazon Machine Images that run in EC2, but CloudVelocity will handle the details of the conversion with its One Hybrid Cloud platform. Likewise, it could convert the clone from VMware to the Xen hypervisor prevalent in the Rackspace cloud and move it there, although that capability won't appear until an undisclosed time in 2013.

The goal is to be able to size up a variety of running applications and be able to move them to the cloud of the owner's choice, though the Santa Clara, Calif., firm isn't yet near that goal.

Chawla, in an interview, termed it "a multi-tier application service," meaning the middleware, such as an application server, Web server and/or a database server, can all be packaged up together in the clone. "What you have locally runs virtually in the cloud," he said.

What about security? Chawla claimed that part of the task of the One Hybrid Cloud is to grasp the security needs of the application in order to set the policies of a firewall and to select the right type of networking for its new location.

Cloud Velocity launched the automation platform Dec. 12, the same day that it closed its first round of venture-capital funding. Mayfield Fund advanced $5 million for the firm. The beta software comes in both a developer edition and an enterprise edition. The former allows developers to quickly clone multi-tier applications and work on development with them; the latter includes the ability to migrate multi-tier apps to the cloud and create failover services via the application generated there.

"We believe that CloudVelocity will have the same impact on public cloud adoption as VMware did on the adoption of server virtualization," said Navin Chaddha, managing director of the Mayfield Fund, in one of the announcement's higher flying statements. CloudVelocity "will make public clouds look like internal data centers," he claimed.

That's hard to do when the application has dozens of dependencies that include a widening web of other custom, enterprise applications. Most companies want to move to the cloud a discrete workload that doesn't need to call other applications frequently for data.

CTO Anand Iyengar said in an interview that One Hybrid Cloud had been adopted by Lealta Media to create failover production systems in the cloud, ready to take over in the event of a disaster in the data center.

"This will help ensure that our online business stays available within the AWS cloud," said Lealta VP of engineering Nitin Shingate in the announcement.

There's no doubt Google has made headway into businesses: Just 28 percent discourage or ban use of its productivity ­products, and 69 percent cite Google Apps' good or excellent ­mobility. But progress could still stall: 59 percent of nonusers ­distrust the security of Google's cloud. Its data privacy is an open question, and 37 percent worry about integration.